


the otherwise perilous blackness

by widow



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Bone Charms (Dishonored), Character Study, Gen, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27192814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/widow/pseuds/widow
Summary: As seriously as she wants to take all those tales of magic and witches, as often as she reads declarations of condemnation from the Abbey of the Everyman, she’s never actually seen any proof that The Outsider is anything but a story; a grim tale told to children to keep them from sticking their heads into wells, or reading too widely, or having an opinion on the Overseers’ favoured methods of wringing confessions from people.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	the otherwise perilous blackness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atramento](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atramento/gifts).



_“Though they are moved by eddies in the celestial medium, stars offer guide points in the otherwise perilous blackness. Our own sun holds its planets close in our inexorable course toward oblivion, giving us life and warmth until the end.”_

— Anton Sokolov, an excerpt from a longer work on the movement of the spheres.

She doesn’t so much as find the talisman as it finds its unerring way to her — halfway through the long nights of the Month of Hearths she wakes up to a pricking in her cheek and finds a chunk of whale bone under her pillow, sharp enough to poke its way entirely through the feather down.

She lights a lantern, breathes in the close, foetid smell of burning whale oil. The clump of carved bone seems to shift in the light, inviting closer inspection. How it was carved, how it found its way under her pillow, how it seems to give off a low hum, like the crash of waves from a distant shore, is beyond her. Still, it invites study. Though it makes her palms itch to hold it directly, she can’t make herself let go until well after the sun rises the next morning. Even then, it’s a struggle to pull herself away.

Mornings in Dunwall are short, slanting things this time of year. The sun is a weak wash of lemon light by the time she rises from her bed and crosses to the window, the sea of dark slate roof tiles beyond the glass a comforting sight after the night she’s had. To her right the clutter of her desk spills onto the floor, and pride of place among the scattered notes an almanac of folk tales from across Gristol lies open at the middle page. _The Rhyme of the Rosewater Hag_ greets her like an old friend when she steps across to stand over the book, concluding with a gnawing dread that her wide reading of the occult has somehow finally caught up to her.

— 

The bone charm’s appeal is dulled by morning light, and so she manages to drag herself away for long enough to go to work in the cannery, though all day she’s close to losing a hand to inattention and the sharp blade of the automated cleaver she works with. It’s always been a dull job, but knowing she could be at home bent over the mystery of the charm or one of her books makes it much worse. 

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the charm would even still be there; it had appeared out of thin air in the dead of night, maybe the sunlight would make it vanish the same way. She could go home and find her bed empty again, a hollow space at the centre of the tangle of blankets she’d carefully wrapped it up in this morning.

The thought makes the back of her neck prickle; that months of poring over any scrap of witchcraft she could get her hands on could lead her so close to the material occult and snatch it away again in the same breath.

Or, and this is an even darker thought, she’d dreamt the thing entire: she’d woken in the night and cradled something that wasn’t there. Hours in the dark, back bent over nothing. 

That almost pulls a wry smile from her; what has she been spending the past few months doing if not exactly that? As seriously as she wants to take all those tales of magic and witches, as often as she reads declarations of condemnation from the Abbey of the Everyman, she’s never actually seen any proof that The Outsider is anything but a story; a grim tale told to children to keep them from sticking their heads into wells, or reading too widely, or having an opinion on the Overseers’ favoured methods of wringing confessions from people.

Until now, that is.

The mechanical thwack of the cleaver stills, and a hard-faced woman appears opposite her, a scowl apparent on her face. Colette is her name: the pale and sinewy manager of her line, responsible for making sure all those jellied eels end up in the cans in perfectly bite-sized pieces.

“You’ve been staring into space half the morning,” she says, her neutral scowling face twisting further. “Get back to work or get out. I can fill this spot with another brainless gawker within the day, one who’ll meet her quota.”

An assenting nod, with downcast eyes. The rest of the day she works hard, opening the valve on the cleaver and letting it run faster than usual, risking her fingertips with every swish and thump of the blade.

And, when she trudges back to her apartment long after the sun has set, the charm greets her by the door, resting on the dark wooden floor right at the threshold, as if it had tried to follow her out the door that morning. 

She tucks it under her pillow that night, the same place she first found it, and her dreams arrive full of song.

— 

It becomes more difficult to find books on the occult in Dunwall; the Abbey's long arm stretching a little further every day. Just last week there was a raid on a building close to the cannery, she hears some of her co-workers speculating on what had been found inside. A shrine built from birch wood wrapped in loops of barbed wire, crusted black with the blood of the heretic who had constructed it. Swathes of expensive purple cloth, whale oil lamps stuffed with herbs giving off a flickering blue light, a medicinal smell. And the walls, scribbled with prayers, or pleas, to The Outsider.

At least, that's what the gossip says.

They burn books across the city; huge pyres are constructed in Holger Square, and the back alleys off Clavering are dotted with smaller blazes as the Abbey’s crackdown on the occult becomes more overt.

She supposes that she is a heretic now too, she would certainly be branded as one if the Overseers were to search her tiny apartment. In addition to the bone charm, now given pride of place on her cleared desk, her small stack of occult texts has grown, despite the trouble she’s had in sourcing new books. Just last night she picked up a water-damaged copy of _The Hungry Nexus_ , saved from the flames by being just a little too damp to burn.

— 

She somehow keeps her job, shows up dutifully for her shifts and works in tight-lipped silence. For once the mindlessness of the work is a blessing, it gives her ample time to think about the materials she’s gathered; her recent trip to the dockside slaughterhouses, and the handful of cast-off bones she’d secreted away while the workers’ backs were turned.

She has a blueprint for the design: her mystery charm, and its intricately carved patterns. Her hands are full of jellied eels, but those patterns are all she sees as she stares down at the metal table.

Actually carving the new charm takes the whole night, and morning finds her red eyed and shaking from exhaustion, a second bone charm held in those trembling fingers to match the first. Now she has two, she feels safe enough to carry one with her; it accompanies her on her trawls of the lower city, the ever more frequent trips to the slaughterhouses, and to the cannery.

— 

She makes more charms, conceals them around her room in the vain hope that if she is raided by the Overseers, she has a chance of sending them away empty-handed. She all but rattles as she walks now, her clothes full of shards of bone. She’s long since stopped feeling the sharp press of their splintered ends when they dig against her skin. The blood makes them stronger; the charms drink it in and keep her safe from greater harm.

Her dreams become stranger the more she carves. The singing never seems to resolve itself into anything she can understand, but the blank, starless void she so often finds herself visiting in the night does. Instead of the vague floating blackness, trawlers and whales adrift in the open air, she dreams of vegetation: creeping vines, green and corded and dotted with bright flowers. She dreams of a paintbrush world, a watercolour impression of a grand manor house stood alone on a moor.

Is she being summoned? Is something waiting for her in that manor house? Is there a place for her in this world, now that she has become the very thing the Abbey has vowed to destroy? No longer an everyman, but a heretic, a bone-carver, a witch.


End file.
